The Last Aztarac

December 11, 2017 3:19 AM

One of the rarest arcade games out there is a color vector machine from Centuri, one of their few in-house titles, called Aztarac (more info - gameplay video). Designed by Tim Stryker, it was a color vector game and only saw a production run of 500 machines (some say more like 200). It is ultra-rare, and almost no units are known to exist intact. The machine failed in the market and Stryker got out of games, eventually finding success as the creator of the MajorBBS bulletin board software before tragically taking his own life at the age of 41.
This is the story of how Tim Stryker's lost, personal Aztarac machine was found for sale in an ad, and how it was restored.
posted by JHarris (38 comments total)

Great story (and find) - thanks for posting this!
posted by carter at 5:40 AM on December 11, 2017

Great stuff! The design of the case and the round porthole-like thing over the screen just make it a beautiful machine, if nothing else.
posted by xingcat at 6:12 AM on December 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

I miss vector games. Not what people now call vector games, which is line graphics, but actual vector scan monitors. Nothing can match the searing brightness.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 6:14 AM on December 11, 2017 [8 favorites]

I love the arcade restoration community.
posted by Theta States at 6:25 AM on December 11, 2017 [3 favorites]

Now only if someone could unearth a working Bishop Of Battle...
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:35 AM on December 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

What a great community! My parents knew the guy who adapted Commando for the US market and kept an original cabinet in his den with the door unlocked so you could trigger as many 1-ups as you wanted. My hands cramp up just remembering it.
posted by Molesome at 6:46 AM on December 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

That is an incredible story. Thank you!
posted by Slinga at 6:46 AM on December 11, 2017

Not what people now call vector games, which is line graphics, but actual vector scan monitors. Nothing can match the searing brightness.

The bad news is: AFAIK, nobody's manufacturing vector-based displays; the technology was entirely CRT-based, and in today's age of LCDs/OLEDs, makes about as much sense as nixie tubes.

The good news is: if you can find a working Vectrex, you can get a cartridge for it which contains a 32-bit microcontroller, and effectively parasitises the Vectrex' 8-bit CPU into a display/interface controller for it.
posted by acb at 6:47 AM on December 11, 2017 [3 favorites]

My parents knew the guy who adapted Commando for the US market and kept an original cabinet in his den with the door unlocked so you could trigger as many 1-ups as you wanted

How much was involved in adapting Japanese arcade games for the US market? Did the adapters get the assembly-language source code and rebuild the whole thing, making changes as needed, or was it just a matter of the original developers having left enough space for localised text and configuration variables at documented locations?
posted by acb at 6:50 AM on December 11, 2017

I was eight - I thought he'd invented the game outright. Imagine my disappointment decades later to discover that he hadn't and was just part of the localisation team.
posted by Molesome at 7:05 AM on December 11, 2017 [3 favorites]

I love that it had been played once and contained exactly one quarter.
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:09 AM on December 11, 2017

I love that it had been played once and contained exactly one quarter.

Yeah, that’s cool, but if that’s true, how can that be reconciled with the picture of Stryker playing the game with his son? It’s hard to imagine that he would set the game up in his home, drop a quarter in, show Ace how to play, and then neither of them ever plays again.

Am I missing something?
posted by Pater Aletheias at 7:17 AM on December 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

Maybe if his son had appreciated the game he had developed, things would have turned out differently?
posted by acb at 7:21 AM on December 11, 2017

He may have had the panel unlocked and triggered the coin entry manually.
posted by GuyZero at 7:22 AM on December 11, 2017 [5 favorites]

I pulled the guy to one side, and told him this wasn’t going to be his day with this machine, and that he needed to leave it to the pros. I almost slapped him across the street when he mentioned 60-1.

Nerd threats. I love it. Seriously, I'm glad this person who likes these things was able to save this particular and important to him/others thing from being bastardized into another thing by someone who had no real knowledge of the thing in question.
posted by RolandOfEld at 7:30 AM on December 11, 2017 [6 favorites]

Gnng, did you have to say that? I had intended to turn my spare Macintosh Classic into a succulent terrarium.
posted by Molesome at 7:35 AM on December 11, 2017 [2 favorites]

It is highly probable that Tim would have played the game set to "Freeplay" in his house requiring no coins. Hence the single credit showing on the coin counter, clocked up in testing at the factory with the single quarter found in the machine. Not sure if it's clear from the original post, but the restored machine was revealed last month in Florida, with members of Stryker's family in attendance. You can read the follow up of the original article here - there's a video of the talk given too.
posted by videotopia at 7:39 AM on December 11, 2017 [5 favorites]

This must have been one of the last vector graphics arcade games, right? It's from 1983, the same year as Major Havoc. Mark Wolf's book also notes Star Wars, Cosmic Chasm, and Black Widow in the same year.

That fishbowl display is something else.
posted by Nelson at 7:48 AM on December 11, 2017

Maybe if his son had appreciated the game he had developed, things would have turned out differently?

Given that he was killed by a vicious and devastating illness that a significant number of us here fight on a daily basis, I find this comment unfortunate.

"Please, people, do not fuck with depression. It's merciless. All it wants is to get you in a room alone and kill you. Take care of yourself."
posted by howfar at 8:20 AM on December 11, 2017 [9 favorites]

videotopia, and anyone else who missed it, there's two article links in the post. videotopia's link is already up there.
posted by JHarris at 9:26 AM on December 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

Not going to lie. The dust in my apartment flared up during the restoration article which had pictures of Tim showing his son Ace how to play, and of the adult Ace showing HIS son how to play.
posted by Samizdata at 9:30 AM on December 11, 2017 [2 favorites]

BTW everyone, this game isn't difficult to get going in MAME. I tried playing it once a couple of years ago and found it hard to get used to, but that was because I found it difficult to control (it's a joystick game with a dial, and a Radar button). Check it out if you can.
posted by JHarris at 9:58 AM on December 11, 2017

Thanks for article! Big fan of those old skool, games, I was in the market for a GORF, but it fell thru...

Mission not completed.
posted by zippercollider at 12:01 PM on December 11, 2017

Yeah, Samizdata, where did that dust come from all of a sudden...
posted by Standard Orange at 12:11 PM on December 11, 2017

Brilliant story. Those two photos at the end were great.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 1:04 PM on December 11, 2017

Nerd threats. I love it.

Pointless nerd threats, what's more. Pop quiz, hotshot: when you're one of two bidders on an item and the other is trying to lowball the bid, do you:

(a) Throw your "weight" around to "intimidate" the other bidder, or
(b) Bid more?
posted by The Tensor at 1:26 PM on December 11, 2017 [2 favorites]

I’m not a computer dude or even that much of a video game enthusiast, but this was an amazing story, and an amazing find, and my vote for best December post so far.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 2:26 PM on December 11, 2017

Some things shouldn't be left to the Invisible Hand Of The Free Market™. And it's arguable that butchering a one-of-a-kind arcade machine to build a case for an emulator board would be in the same category as determining, rationally, that we can't afford polar bears or that the optimum use for the Mona Lisa is recycling it to make toilet paper.
posted by acb at 3:05 PM on December 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

I don't have much of a handle of graphics...did these vector graphics look similar to the Asteroids game (except in colour)?
posted by bonobothegreat at 5:27 PM on December 11, 2017

Yep.

See also the amazing Star Wars Xwing game, and the also amazing Tempest.
posted by Sebmojo at 5:55 PM on December 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

There was also this baby, which I only ever saw in one arcade in NYC, circa 1980. You sat down in the version I played (rather than standing). I also recall the joystick being made from milled metal and being rather 'sloppy' in it's action.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_Gunner
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 6:24 PM on December 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

Without question, this is my favorite thing today on the internet.
posted by smallerdemon at 7:00 PM on December 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

Oh my god, I forgot Star Wars was a vector game. Other vector games I loved: Battle Zone, Star Castle, Red Baron, and the ultimate example, Tempest.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 7:07 PM on December 11, 2017 [2 favorites]

Vector games occupied this weird space in my brain that felt like it was seeing a vision of another place that showed us how good things could look. I have simultaneous memories of playing Donkey Kong on the Atari 2600 and seeing the crystal clarity of vector graphic home machines. But they never took off. Almost like a visitor from the future, and we didn't listen. So we got pixelated stuff for a long, long time. I almost feel like it was a portal to another time and place in which things looked so good, it almost wasn't believed, and so we were left with the consequences of our unbelief until a time that anti-aliasing got good enough to be a rough approximation.
posted by SpacemanStix at 10:21 PM on December 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

The reality was, operators didn't like Vector games. They were unreliable, and required different skillsets to maintain and repair. What you see with the later colour vector games (Space Duel, Black Widow, Gravitar, Major Havoc and Aztarac as examples) is more complex gameplay compared to the Pac-Mans or Space Invaders, that doesn't lend itself to the arcade environment. I think it's only now in later life, that many collectors have started to appreciate the deep game mechanics and inherent beauty in these old vector based arcade games.
posted by videotopia at 2:49 AM on December 12, 2017 [2 favorites]

Ok, followed Starty Bartfast's link because it jogged something I remembered about that StarWars game and not liking the way the images alluded to showing perspective without actually doing it. and then..... Battlezone! What an amazing game for that time period. Great link and story.
posted by bonobothegreat at 5:15 PM on December 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

A few years ago I hacked MAME to output vectors to a DAC board and gave a talk about it at 32C3. My vectormame supports all of the vector games on wikipedia, and Aztarac is playable on a Vectrex, although it is monochrome and lacks the fishbowl display.
posted by autopilot at 3:21 AM on December 13, 2017 [4 favorites]

That's some amazing work, autopilot. It's a shame that laser displays don't work better; you'd think that'd be a perfect modern alternative.
posted by Nelson at 7:56 AM on December 13, 2017